In many industrial settings, workers are routinely exposed to potentially damaging noise environments during their workday. The issue of potential hearing damage often arises in manufacturing and other industrial facilities, but may also arise in military settings, airport settings, and other work environments that involve potentially damaging noise exposure. There is a need to both protect against hearing damage and also to monitor workers' hearing to determine if there has been any significant hearing loss due to environmental noise. Hearing protection and hearing monitoring may work synergistically together to provide improved hearing protection, since the ability to monitor for hearing loss allows for better evaluation of the effectiveness of the hearing protection and allows for corrective action to be taken at an early stage (which may limit permanent hearing loss, possibly by allowing action at the first signs of temporary hearing loss). Examples of corrective action could include modifying and/or supplementing hearing protection, reducing time in the noise environment, and/or removing the worker from the noise environment, by way of non-exclusive example.
To be effective for this purpose, embodiments of the present invention may offer both hearing protection and hearing testing, and may provide regular hearing testing in a way that is not burdensome or time or labor intensive. Rather, it offers a convenient approach that may easily be integrated into the standard workday without any significant disruption to routine. Providing an integrated hearing test within safety hearing protection that workers will wear anyway (for example, for OSHA compliance) may also allow for self-administered audiometric testing that may be run independent of location. The convenience of this type of integrated design makes regular, frequent audiometric testing easier to perform, and by increasing the frequency of such testing, may ultimately result in improved hearing protection.